Comments on: The Battle I am Losinghttps://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2016/04/the-battle-i-am-losing/
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:03:44 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.3By: Georgiy Kuznetsovhttps://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2016/04/the-battle-i-am-losing/#comment-12376
Thu, 19 May 2016 00:38:42 +0000https://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=1205#comment-12376Two weeks ago I came across this post and realized that I had a new kind of puzzles. I just did not think in this direction. So I tried to post a comment, but the script was broken. I wrote to the blogger couple times, but the email account appeared to be disconnected either.

Several days ago I posted the link to few demo puzzles on https://www.reddit.com/r/puzzles/. This group is not very active, some members expressed interest, nobody could solve anything this far. Today I found the commenting script working and went on to post this.

Now, since I did it on Reddit, may I quote my posting? Thank you for your kind permission.

Disclaimer: I neither sell anything, nor profit from any sales. I have no products or services to offer. I made some demos and prototypes, and I am seeking feedback. My software is 100% my JavaScript, no third party scripting, no ads, no user information collected and no money making by any mean.

I think came across an entirely new kind of puzzles. I am not in this business, so I decided to bring it to your attention.

I created a computer toy, which was supposed to be a construction set for temporospatial patterns. Those are the patterns unfolding and repeating in time.

The toy (named [FIREPEGS](http://firepegs.com)) was very simple, and I thought it would be easy. Soon I realized it could be a puzzle. I could show a pattern and challenge another user to produce it.

Did you think of a jigsaw puzzle? There is some similarity indeed. The difference is, in FIREPEGS the elements act simultaneously according to the rules, and the image changes. To solve a FIREPEGS puzzle, one has to figure out what causes what, where and then.

The toy was made for children. The idea was that playing with space, time and causality would prepare them for engineering and science. Hence, I was looking for the easy challenges pushing aside the hard-to-solve ones.

Guess, the hard-to-solve challenges has reached the critical mass because recently I made a e-booklet introducing few of them. It is available at [http://firepegs.com/_ab/z.html](http://firepegs.com/_ab/z.html).

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The biggest reason I did not do it earlier was what the toy takes some learning. For a beginner, it’s probably on par with checkers. I thought, nobody would want to learn it to solve a puzzle or two. Now even I collected enough of them, and I am sure you will find more.

The booklet tells what to see and what to do. If you prefer me to introduce the toy right here – OK, FIREPEGS is a community of cellular automata on a regular grid. If you happened to play with Conway’s Life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life) you will understand FIREPEGS quickly. Or you may learn something new.

In my narration, firepegs don’t die. Instead, they wake up (fire up), show their colors and fall asleep. You can change their colors, but the truly challenging part is changing the numbers on the links. Changing the numbers, you build a ‘social’ network. When the network is ready, you fire up a firepeg or two. They make their status updates available to their neighbors, the neighbors fire up in turn, and the network may begin oscillate in a way you wanted. Or not.